Occupy Wall Street and the Left

Occupy Wall Street, for all its talk of hori­zont­al­ity, autonomy, and decent­ral­ized pro­cess, is recen­ter­ing the eco­nomy, enga­ging in class war­fare without nam­ing the work­ing class as one of two great hos­tile forces but instead by present­ing cap­it­al­ism as a wrong against the people. It’s put­ting cap­it­al­ism back at cen­ter of left polit­ics — no won­der, then, that it has opened up a new sense of pos­sib­il­ity for so many of us: it has reignited polit­ical will. In a way, it’s return­ing to the left its miss­ing core or soul, what has been dis­placed or denied since we turned our back on the com­mun­ist hori­zon. It’s react­iv­at­ing the Marx­ist insight that class struggle is a polit­ical struggle. As I men­tioned before, a new Pew poll finds a nine­teen per­cent­age point increase since 2009 of the num­ber of Amer­ic­ans who believe there are strong or very strong con­flicts between the rich and poor. Two thirds per­ceive this con­flict — and per­ceive it as more intense than divi­sions of race and immig­ra­tion status (African Amer­ic­ans see class con­flict as more sig­ni­fic­ant than white people do).

My claim, then, is that when occupy wall street speaks the lan­guage of cap­it­al­ism and the “no left,” when it dis­avows rep­res­ent­a­tion, exclu­sion, dog­mat­ism, and uto­pi­an­ism, it’s at its weak­est; it’s no dif­fer­ent from the left we’ve had from the last thirty years or from its lar­ger set­ting in com­mu­nic­at­ive cap­it­al­ism. But, when it re-​centers the eco­nomy and class struggle, when it focuses on cap­it­al­ism — Wall Street — on oppos­i­tion, on col­lect­iv­ism, and on walk­ing new paths, cre­at­ing new prac­tices, open­ing up new com­mon modes of pro­du­cing and dis­trib­ut­ing, that’s its heart, that’s what brings it to life.

How Occupy Wall Street is re-​centering the eco­nomy is an open, fluid, chan­ging, and intensely debated ques­tion. It’s not a tra­di­tional move­ment of the work­ing class organ­ized in trade uni­ons or tar­get­ing work places, although it is a move­ment of class struggle (espe­cially when we recog­nize with Marx and Engels that the work­ing class is not a fixed, empir­ical class but a fluid, chan­ging class of those who have to sell their labor power in order to sur­vive). Occupy’s use of strikes and occu­pa­tions tar­gets the cap­it­al­ist sys­tem more broadly, shut­ting down ports and stock exchanges (I think of the ini­tial shut downs in Oak­land and on Wall Street as proof of con­cepts, proof that it can be done). People aren’t being mobil­ized as work­ers; they are being mobil­ized as people, as every­body else, as the rest of us, as the major­ity — 99% – who are being thor­oughly screwed by the top one per­cent in mul­tiple parts of our lives: edu­ca­tion, health, food, the envir­on­ment, hous­ing, and work. Cap­it­al­ism in the US has sold itself as free­dom — but increas­ing num­bers of us feel trapped, prac­tic­ally enslaved. It used to be that people went to col­lege to get a good job, so they wouldn’t be stuck flip­ping bur­gers and wait­ing tables. Now people go to col­lege and are told they have to work without pay in order to get a good job — so they flip bur­gers and wait tables to try to pay their col­lege debts while work­ing for free as interns.

Because people aren’t mobil­ized primar­ily as work­ers but as those who are pro­let­ari­an­ized and exploited in every aspect of our lives — at risk of fore­clos­ure and unem­ploy­ment, dimin­ish­ing futures, increas­ing debts, shrunken space of free­dom, accel­er­ated depend­ence on a sys­tem that is rap­idly fail­ing (I’m think­ing here of the ways cor­por­a­tions file for bank­ruptcy and thus shed their oblig­a­tions to pay people their earned and expec­ted pen­sions as well as the ongo­ing threats to Social Secur­ity, Medi­care, and Medicaid) — because people are mobil­ized as the 99%, the attack on cap­it­al­ism takes dif­fer­ent forms, forms loosely asso­ci­ated with the ideo­lo­gical span of the con­tem­por­ary left.

1. Progressive/​left-​liberal Demo­crat: con­sti­tu­tional reform, legis­lat­ive goals (abol­ish cor­por­ate per­son­hood; money out of polit­ics); loc­ate prob­lem in polit­ical process.

2. Left Keyne­sian: jobs for all demand, tax the rich; loc­ate prob­lem in the economy

3. Anarch­ists — see the state as well as hier­arch­ical and cent­ral­ized power as the primary prob­lem (cap­it­al­ism depends on the state); solu­tion is to con­sti­tute altern­at­ive prac­tices, along­side or out­side the main­stream; a polit­ics of refusal and cre­at­ive pro­duc­tion; any attempt to seize the state will just repro­duce the struc­tures of power and pat­terns of beha­vior in which we are caught.

4. Communists/​revolu­tion­ary social­ists — see the eco­nomy as the primary prob­lem (state as instru­ment of class power); goal is over-​throwing cap­it­al­ism and estab­lish­ing com­mun­ism. Rather than emphas­iz­ing spe­cific local prac­tices, more inter­ested in gen­eral strike, grow­ing the move­ment, ques­tions of strategy. To be frank: find­ing them­selves in the pos­i­tion of not hav­ing been able to achieve in the con­tem­por­ary US — mass mobil­iz­a­tion — when the anarch­ists, with their emphases on autonomy, hori­zont­al­ity, inclu­sion, and con­sensus have. This is occa­sion­ing a great deal of thought and reflec­tion among social­ists. Some are con­cerned with pos­i­tion­ing them­selves in the van­guard of the move­ment. Oth­ers, rightly, recog­nize that the move­ment is itself the van­guard; the move­ment is itself ush­er­ing in some­thing bey­ond cap­it­al­ism, even as it isn’t sure what this is (indeed the movement’s very mul­ti­pli­city makes this sen­tence pretty awk­ward and mis­lead­ing; the move­ment isn’t sin­gu­lar, it’s divided in itself).

At the same time, faced with mul­tiple evic­tions (accord­ing to Fire­dog Lake there are 62 remain­ing encamp­ments in the US), the Occupy move­ment itself is reflect­ing, think­ing on what has worked, what hasn’t, what’s next for the move­ment. A num­ber of people, groups, and occu­pa­tions are address­ing prob­lems with the Gen­eral Assembly struc­ture and con­sensus. Many GAs have become dys­func­tional; attend­ance is declin­ing. Or, the com­bin­a­tion of work­ing groups and GAs is so demand­ing that the very people for whom the move­ment is fight­ing can’t par­ti­cip­ate — they got a day job and a night job or two or three. A cur­rently cir­cu­lat­ing memo from a mem­ber of the Tech Ops and Out­reach groups of OWS high­lights the ways this nom­in­ally inclus­ive move­ment has actu­ally pro­duced bar­ri­ers to involve­ment — it’s hard for people to know how to get more involved.

Any­way, back to the dif­fer­ent ideo­lo­gical strands: it doesn’t make sense to think of these as a coali­tion. Rather, the move­ment is a con­ver­gence of the people who bring with them ideas and sup­pos­i­tions that loosely fit under one or two of the four cat­egor­ies. Some are exper­i­enced act­iv­ists with move­ment and party exper­i­ence; oth­ers have inclin­a­tions and intu­itions. What unites them right now is the sense that cap­it­al­ism is not work­ing — but some think it can and should be fixed and oth­ers don’t. And this means that there is a primary divi­sion at the heart of the movement.

It might be that this divi­sion is gen­er­at­ive — enabling a divi­sion of labor and an attack on our cur­rent polit­ical and eco­nomic sys­tem at mul­tiple levels. Yet, it could also be the case that work­ing for some goals pre­cludes work­ing for other goals, not only tak­ing away energy and focus but actu­ally but­tress­ing insti­tu­tions and prac­tices that some of us should be des­troyed and replaced.

Tags: Left, Occupy

This entry was posted on 24 January 2012 at 7:37 am and is filed under Critical Legal Education, Political Philosophy, Radical Politics. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.